Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday December 09, 2011 @06:22PM
from the i-am-a-kung-fu dept.

jd writes "There has been research for some time showing that London cab driver brains differ from other people's, with considerable enlargement of those areas dealing with spacial relationships and navigation. Follow-up work showed it wasn't simply a product of driving a lot (PDF). However, up until now it has been disputed as to whether the brain structure led people to become London cabbies or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world). Well, this latest study answers that. MRI scans before and after the training show that the regions of the brain substantially grow as a result of the training, and they're quite normal beforehand. The practical upshot of this research is that — even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to change much — what you learn structurally changes your brain. Significantly."

I think the focus of the rebuilding was on enforcing building codes that would prevent future catastrophic fires.

They did try to improve the city layout, but the actual layout I don't believe was improved significantly because it would have meant buying out many property owners and the city couldn't afford that nor fight against the public outrage of displacing so many people. I seem to also remember from a documentary that so many took the initiative to begin rebuilding their homes and businesses so quickly that there wasn't any proper surveying done, plus the damage was so extensive it was difficult to tell where walls were previously. So property lines moved slightly and made things worse than before in some cases.

Well, neural plasticity does slow down considerably after early adulthood. I imagine you're responding to the theory that plasticity simply halted after childhood, which has been disproven many times. Neuroscience is a complex field that ties Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Neurology etc together. It's hard to make any lasting broad statements about the brain and how it works.

The following is what I could dig up on the effects of multi-lingualism. It does impact the brain in many different areas and there appears to be a growing belief that learning a new language at any age will have a pronounced impact on your ability to think and reason, but that if taught young the improvements are far more dramatic still. I didn't want to clutter the submission with this stuff, especially as these studies don't have nearly the same level of rigour as the MRI scans of the taxi drivers (where a whole host of variables can now be examined directly versus the somewhat more indirect studies done on polyglots). They're also a bit more controversial, with opposing studies claiming that the benefits either don't exist or don't exist in the way that is claimed.

There IS a fascinating "reverse" case, where alteration of the brain resulted in a remarkable alteration in musical ability, but as far as I know there has been no real work done on what changes the brain has undergone as a consequence of the new obsession.